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Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Courgette Polpettes

My new favorite thing is the Jamie Oliver magazine. Okay, not so new since I have been buying it for the last couple of years and have a complete collection from Issue No 1, except for a couple I missed because they just didn’t bring them to Singapore and KL and no one I knew was traveling to the UK.I say new favorite thing because I just bought Issue No 20 with my iPad as an iPad app. It is wonderful! I came across this recipe and had to make it with the one large zucchini I got in my last share basket from Central City Co-op.Courgette is, of course, the British word for zucchini.

Adapted from Jamie magazine

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil

250g (8 oz.) courgette/zucchini (I used the one good-sized one you see here on the left)

1 clove garlic

1 egg, lightly beaten

4 heaping tbsp freshly grated Parmesan

3/4 cup of grated mozzarella

1 slice of whole grain bread

1 tbsp chopped parsley

Freshly ground black pepper and sea salt, to taste

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (400ºF.) Peel the zucchini and chop into little bitty squares.

Heat oil in a large frying pan over a medium-high heat and fry the zucchini for about 10 minutes, until tender and golden. Set aside to cool a little.

Whizz the egg, bread and garlic around in a food processor, and then combine with all the other ingredients to make a thick, sticky mixture.

That mush is the egg, bread and garlic.

With the cheese piled on.

Everything mixed together.

Season if you like with black pepper and a little sea salt, remembering that the cheese will add salt, so be careful. If you don’t have a food processor, use breadcrumbs in place of the slice of bread and mince your garlic very finely before mixing the egg and all the other ingredients.

Drizzle a little olive oil in your baking tray. Spread around with your hands. Do not wash them as the oil will help with the next step. Using a spoon, drop blobs of the mixture onto your pan and, one at a time, roll gently into balls in your oily palms and place them back in the pan.

Bake for about 15 minutes, until golden. Serve warm with a dipping sauce of spiced yogurt, if desired.

Cooking for people I love, creating deliciousness out of fresh ingredients, browsing through cookbooks for inspiration, perusing grocery shelves for choice items and writing about my expat life enriched by food. That's what I do here.